Mac OS X 10.7 Lion: the Ars Technica review

Lion is no shrinking violet.

Mac OS X 10.7 was first shown to the public in October 2010. The presentation was understated, especially compared to the bold rhetoric that accompanied the launches of the iPhone ("Apple reinvents the phone") and the iPad ("a magical and revolutionary device at an unbelievable price"). Instead, Steve Jobs simply called the new operating system "a sneak peek at where we're going with Mac OS X."

Behind Jobs, the screen listed the seven previous major releases of Mac OS X: Cheetah, Puma, Jaguar, Panther, Tiger, Leopard, and Snow Leopard. Such brief retrospectives are de rigueur at major Mac OS X announcements, but long-time Apple watchers might have felt a slight tingle this time. The public "big cat" branding for Mac OS X only began with Jaguar; code names for the two earlier versions were not well known outside the developer community and were certainly not part of Apple's official marketing message for those releases. Why bring the cat theme back to the forefront now?

The answer came on the next slide. The next major release of Mac OS X would be called Lion. Jobs didn't make a big deal out of it; Lion's just another big cat name, right? Within seconds, we were on to the next slide, where Jobs was pitching the new release's message: not "king of the jungle" or "the biggest big cat," but the "back to the Mac" theme underlying the entire event. Mac OS X had spawned iOS, and now Apple was bringing innovations from its mobile operating system back to Mac OS X.

Apple had good reason to shy away from presenting Lion as the pinnacle that its name implies. The last two major releases of Mac OS X were both profoundly shaped by the meteoric rise of their younger sibling, iOS.

Steve Jobs presents the first seven releases of Mac OS X in a slightly unusual format

Leopard arrived later than expected, and in the same year that the iPhone was introduced. Its successor, Snow Leopard, famously arrived with no new features, concentrating instead on internal enhancements and bug fixes. Despite plausible official explanations, it was hard to shake the feeling that Apple's burgeoning mobile platform was stealing resources—not to mention the spotlight—from the Mac.

In this context, the name Lion starts to take on darker connotations. At the very least, it seems like the end of the big cat branding—after all, where can you go after Lion? Is this process of taking the best from iOS and bringing it back to the Mac platform just the first phase of a complete assimilation? Is Lion the end of the line for Mac OS X itself?

Let's put aside the pessimistic prognostication for now and consider Lion as a product, not a portent. Apple pegs Lion at 250+ new features, which doesn't quite match the 300 touted for Leopard, but I guess it all depends on what you consider a "feature" (and what that "+" is supposed to mean). Still, this is the most significant release of Mac OS X in many years—perhaps the most significant release ever. Though the number of new APIs introduced in Lion may fall short of the landmark Tiger and Leopard releases, the most important changes in Lion are radical accelerations of past trends. Apple appears tired of dragging people kicking and screaming into the future; with Lion, it has simply decided to leave without us.

In reality, every feature has some associated maintenance cost. This is perhaps even more true of a binary translation framework that may have deep hooks into the operating system. I'm willing to give Apple the benefit of the doubt and assume that disentangling PowerPC-related code from the operating system once and for all was important enough to justify the customer inconvenience. But it still stings a little.

Apple is one of the most profitable companies in the world, and is the MOST valuable company in the world right now, edging out ExxonMobil and PetroChina.

I don’t see how they can really justify this beyond planned obsolescence. They have more than enough resources to keep around a framework that lets you use applications developed as recently as 2007.

I'm not sure about this whole scrolling thing. The old paradigm is that the content is fixed and you scroll the window to see a different part of the content. In the new paradigm, the window is fixed and you push the content around. Either could be considered "natural". I guess in a more literal sense, the window really is usually fixed. My monitor is not moving, and when I'm scrolling, the window frame is fixed on the screen.

The iPad has some exceptions. That stargazing app is one, where you move the iPad around and it shows you what the iPad window "sees". Taking a photo is of course another - you move the phone/camera/iDevice to see different content.

In reality, every feature has some associated maintenance cost. This is perhaps even more true of a binary translation framework that may have deep hooks into the operating system. I'm willing to give Apple the benefit of the doubt and assume that disentangling PowerPC-related code from the operating system once and for all was important enough to justify the customer inconvenience. But it still stings a little.

Apple is one of the most profitable companies in the world, and is the MOST valuable company in the world right now, edging out ExxonMobil and PetroChina.

I don’t see how they can really justify this beyond planned obsolescence. They have more than enough resources to keep around a framework that lets you use applications developed as recently as 2007.

It's probably a good thing for the platform as a whole. There are many people who say the biggest problem with Windows is Microsoft's insistence on staying backwards compatible with every release. They'll even emulate bugs that existed in certain Windows versions. At a certain point you have to say enough is enough.

Regarding Lion in my eyes as an early tester etc etc, it's still a bit shaky in some part, and I can't for the life of me understand how this can be the same release as the GM release seeded to developers weeks ago, there is a lot of open bugs in Radar and some is really serious. Especially if you're using you're Mac at the office networking using AD etc.

Except for the part above, I feel that Lion is bringing in some nice touches when it comes to UI, and I guess one can't expect less from Apple. No matter what you think about Apple, they are freaking good at UI design and making a consistent UI (with exception of iCal and Address book, yes, I'm a hater in that matter).

What interests me is where these industries are headed with these operating systems on multiple fronts - Apple has their iOS for devices and Mac OSx for computers; Google has it even more confusing with Chromium OS in the cloud, Honeycomb on large devices and Froyo/Gingerbread for handheld devices. Microsoft has all sorts of desktop and server OSes, windows phone 7, and rumors of returning to project Longhorn for Windows 8 (perhaps dropping .Net framework and pissing off a lot of devs). At what point does the industry pick a direction to go in and stop all the forking?

I read the first page, flipped through the others and read the last. Didn't feel right but, hey, did it anyhow. The last few paragraphs on the last page though are important near-philisophical stuff ;-) Thank-you. The YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhOG25fM8so linked to earlier is also a good filler when one gets the we're down message - the first time I ever got that, BTW. Way to go. I hope I can resist to 10.7.1 - I always hope.

Good review, half way through it. (I recommend reading from the last page backwards.)

Looks like a fine update although I know I will be cursing the invisible scrollbars and know that my mother will not understand (then come to understand, then forget) that a given folder might not have just 4 items in it.

Also, the color vampire needs to have a crimson-tinged stake driven through its grey-blooded heart.

Hmm, what I'm wondering: If you buy a new Mac with Lion installed and need to re-install it (after replacing the HD), how do you do this? You don't have installation media, you don't have a system to get it from the App Store and even if you had one you'd need to buy it again. Or will Apple add installation media (like the USB stick with the MBA) later?

Since it is now ok to run 2 virtualized instances of Lion on one machine and Apple's preferred method of installing Lion is to do it over an existing SL install, does that mean that it might now be easy to run SL on a virtual machine?

I tried to read all of it, but did you touch on being able to VNC in to a second graphical login?

Not only that, it adds a second layer of security, in my (limited) testing, you ALWAYS go to the login screen when you VNC in, meaning you still need to know other credentials. (HUGE + in my book). I suspect you might be saving this bit for a server review.

Since there are 19 pages to the review, I didn't want to wait before correcting two errors from the first page.

The first, of course, is that there were new features in Snow Leopard, as John knows very well. Apple just chose to not make a big deal of it.

The second is that Lion will be available on a USB stick in August, according to Apple. But they are really encouraging people to go download, as they will be charging $69 for it. But, I believe that covers all the machines "controlled" by the buyer, as is the download version, so it's still pretty cheap.

Apple also says that anyone who can get to an Apple store can download Lion off their servers if they don't have a good connection. No charge other than the upgrade price, of course.

Other than that, I'm going back to the review, which I expect to be really good, as always.

Ah, I just noticed the article has been updated. I didn't see that the first time.

John Siracusa / John Siracusa has a B.S. in Computer Engineering from Boston University. He has been a Mac user since 1984, a Unix geek since 1993, and is a professional web developer and freelance technology writer.